Monday, May 26, 2014

The firearm has replaced the remote control as the choice extension of the
central nervous system. The automotive/motor vehicle nervous system
detailed by McLuhan has become inverted, a womb instead of a tomb, though no
less unsafe at any speed than in its Naderian days. Patriarchs must
seek the death drive elsewhere, since mortality in an automobile is now sudden
(mid-text, between latte sips, in the midst of absolute comfort). The ego
has not yet accepted its satiation, its ability to replicate the fertile cradle
of the womb without the attendant mother, the mobile sanctuary module complete
with Big Gulp/D-sized cup holders for Jumbo Cocoa Colostrum.

The remote control nervous system that followed the dominance of the
automotive nervous system is essentially fossilized too, having been absorbed
into the abstraction of the web’s singular consciousness, networked socially
into the direct corporate transference of RSS feeding tubes. Whereas once it
was a substitute for control, now the remote control, replaced almost entirely
by the smart phone, is a habit-forming entity, a control in and of itself, a
nerve network not by extension of the corporeal but as life support system for
the body.

Now, the family unit, spoken for by proxy via the American male patriarch (feeling
reduced to a mere shell casing by the existence of other voices at the
collective dinner table), bows to the phallic luster of the gun. The cross was
once wielded as a sidearm. Its symbolic efficacy was in the substitution of the
Christ figure for the method of his destruction, but arched sideways the cross
becomes a projectile weapon capable of expunging the lord’s holy vengeance
silently through implied violence (more on the “implied” in just a minute). The gun is a monolith, an amulet of the
absolutism of mortality. And in a
culture that celebrates death and branding, the gun is God.

For the follower and the missionary of the church of holy death, the goal when
holding one’s piece is to cock the hammer and ejaculate vengeance to assert
power. If the spray of bullets seems
sexual, this is no accident. The phallus has been weaponized against
mates since the time of pri-mates and now its artificial parallax is being
used, with no small degree sociopathic intent (and occasionally homoerotic
desire), to hold other marginalized populations in submission.

The gun spray cumshots are secretly normalized. They are the common denouement of every porno
and action film alike. They are frowned
upon “IRL”, but normative in the consensuality that allows them to become accepted
and unspectacular when happening to marginalized targets, (life in the
“ghetto”, “crimes of passion”). As long
as the deviance (bursts of bullet jizz) is sporadic and decentralized
(“apolitical”), they can go on unabated.
To even address them in polite company would be a greater sin than the
myriad oozing bodies dripping below the patriarch/phallic-cult devotee’s cold,
brute determinism (final judgment outsourced to the crucifix end-user).

Men have come to prefer the cumshot in porn because its extrinsic nature
allows no possibility of childbirth.
Just as well, cumshots feed into the survivalist cultural nostalgia for
the hunter-gatherer society as well as the Greco-Roman warrior victory rapes by
allowing sex without procreation or sex without fatherhood to persist. Just as well, it provides relief for men who
must endure a burdensome dependence upon women for the perpetuation of the
species. Without people or animals to kill constantly, men are left without
meaning, hanging with their third arm/firearm in the wind. When survival is
easy for an unnecessary species, one must create threats to justify one’s place
at the top of the food chain, proffering legitimacy by inventing bold
conspiracy theories. Or play zero sum games that attempt to mollify/disarm
purpose from either A) those (mothers) whose biological destiny is rich with
meaning or B) those (oppressed groups) whose struggle frames them as the
recipients of history.

But the sacral significance of childbirth is not lost on the desubjectivized
Y chromosome subject. Perhaps due to the distantiation of the post-hunter/gatherer
male from motherhood and the eternal separation of the anus from childbirth,
Phallus Dei must hold youth in high regard. Indeed it will be youth who
will need to survive when the Bush Doctrine of tactile preemptive assault is
applied to the ensuant zombie apocalypse and we slay the undead before they’re
undead with the help of our exterminating halo-tipped angels. (The fad for
zombie-kill porn is the outsourced final judgment, which quenches the
patriarch’s bloodlust in the form of general misanthropy. In Zombie fiction,
the enemy is everyone and everyone must be bludgeoned or shot in properly
ejaculatory fashion. Catharsis for those too polite to partake in mass
shootings).

With the sacralization of youth at
the expense of motherhood then, men of the gun-worship illuminati cult thus
recognize Adam Lanza’s sin was in his target, in producing child porn, spraying
the wrong targets and appealing to the wrong demographic, precipitating an
event that mocked God’s free-market rationalism ( that event being the
Situationist/Industrial music credo that absolute freedom was best exemplified
in the Moor Murders/the surrealists saying the most surreal act is running down
a street firing a gun at random/Ayn Rand with the blinders on going on about the
versatility of heroic myth while belittling the poor as parasites and ushering in
their destruction via the pesticide infinity of accumulative ritual power/Hannah
Arendt admonishing proto-neocon Leo Strauss as being no better than the German
fascists he fled/anarchism as libertarianism with arbitrary pipe bombs instead
of self-sustaining militias/fundamentalism whose ends justify so many means
that it teeters on nihilism).

We need to protect guns from the people who would do them harm, hurting a
gun being the equivalent of openly ripping the bible in the town square (It
would never hurt a fly; it’d kill it dead). We’re half-afraid guns will
punish us if we abandon them, like a lovelorn mate trapped in an abusive
relationship (cue gender role reversal #1). We feel emotionally attached to the
gun as provider, the life-taker that allows us to invert the intrinsic power
dynamic of childbirth and send the (18 and above, please) products of the
childbirth back into the womb of the earth’s tomb. If they take our guns, the only option is massive
upheaval, a temper tantrum at the mom/nanny/bitch who took our toys. Bukkake
the heretics into mass graves. These are the terrorists who would crucify
Koresh, surrender Alex Jones to the fate of Milton William Cooper, leave poor
Bernie Goetz to his white supremacist fanfic, and delibidinize Nichols and
McVeigh (the American soldier must remain posed in rescue-ready portraiture,
not rendered in an amputated, impotent hospital setting. More on him in a bit).

Our martyrs are self-inflected wounds, bad guys we invent to justify
murdering them publicly. James Holmes and his head on the spike will
welcome entrance in the suffering city, a place where everlasting pain is bred
by the eternal endurance of gravity’s transience, the forever passing notion of
inevitability rather than prevention (“there is no alternative”). What happens is soon forgotten, 140
characters like Holmes gone in a flicker like discarded matchbooks pressed
sporadically against the ground to keep the world aflame. It’s all
disease and no cure. Mass shootings become simulacrums, interminable war
refracted through the capitalist green zones. Like collateral damage, all the
dead kids must be scrubbed for the grand religious narrative, the forcefeel of
emotional security. We are safe because
the guns that are in the wrong hands are in the right hands are in the left
hands are in God’s holy temple.

Our weapons, though expulsive, remain composed in the absence of the
end-user/consumer/missionary subject. Lying flat on a table, a gun is at
perfect harmony with the world it creates. In their anthropomorphic inertia, guns
exercise perfect restraint in all the ways that men cannot and are therefore
the conservative platonic ideal; power as (literal) pillar, power as pure concentrated
energy, a negation of Focault’s idea of power as a process. The substitute
father/god figure of the gun is a paradigm of stoic virtue, the absence of
feminine emotionalism and irrationality. Crimes of passion are the vice
of men. Guns are pure of intent. And it’s
intent that men value, specifically how well intent correlates to popular
subjectivity. Shooting a gun with noble
intent is an act of heroism. Shooting it
with ill intent is something else entirely.

The gun assumes a gaze of authoritative respect; its very presence in a dimmed
room demands submission to its fascistic whims. Its essentialist nature as a
power object (decontextualized of the means of production) contravenes the
existential rights of liberty. The gun
repurposes freedom as bondage to the gunowner.
Thus, worship of the gun is a master-slave relationship, a Stockholm
Syndrome where the victim kidnaps himself.
Guns are almighty because they take life, they dominate us. But as mere functional utilities, they do not
do so on their own, they transfer their godlike powers unto us. They are beholden to our will. People kill people. Guns merely confirm that men are
killers.

To present a gun in a room is to violate a human being who thought they were
free. Guns perform the rape of consciousness even if rape by will is not
enacted by its user. To not own a gun is surrender, which is perhaps why
several U.S. district counties have toyed with the idea of making their
purchase mandatory (and coverage from getting shot by them is not compulsory, let
the chips fall where they may: maternal value collapsed under the money shot of
free enterprise). Thus, the two roles
left for women in the phallic utopia, victims and vigilantes, have been
mischaracterized because they assume the freedom to choose even these limited
roles. A room with a gun in it is a room
frozen in space-time, suspended from motion until the gun and its user define
the terms of continuity.

What guns don’t do is pertinent, as psychic violence is perhaps its most
common crime, but this is largely unprosecutable. With a gun in the room, the violation need
not be measured in physical holes. Its
first victim is speech. A gun is in
charge of the conversation and he who writes the scripts determines where the
narrative goes.

If the gun is god, it is also father, as well as big other. The very thing
preventing a lasting peace (a world without guns) is the presence of the
gun. If this mystic power did not exist,
we would not need to use it to kill the men who yield it. But as a phallic weapon
that protects male extinction in the age of artificial reproduction, the gun
forms a lasting barrier to keep women contained (“safe”) and constantly refreshes
the collective unconscious horrors that plague them (the hero creates a
situation that puts the damsel in peril/”distress”, but is vindicated as he
rescues her. The heroism is rewarded and
the peril is forgotten).

A gun’s strange black magick makes invisible its ambient terror, as well as its
rape of consciousness, and simulcasts an inversion of itself as the preventer
of terror and rape. As a tactile piece of metallurgy, the firearm’s structure
suggests that it is a cause-and-effect apparatus. Like shopping, part of the gun’s sense of
security that is provided to the impotent male is the production of immediate
results. There is no red tape. There are not multiple steps and layers of
due process to navigate. You go to the
store, you buy the item and leave. You
go to the bad guy, you fire the gun and leave. Free market magick with no externalities. And so many varieties with which to
accessorize (the housewife gender role reversal #2)!

Hence, with guns, there are only cumshots and no comas, only bodies and no
victim’s family. The only residue is the
cumshot/blood leak/ crime scene itself, with a quick fade on to the next scene.
No interiority from the body bathed in sticky blood. No lingering sense of anything lost or the
humility of the victim. Thus, the byline reads that a gun’s purpose in society
is to outsource crime prevention, not to hasten crime creation. A clever
editing scheme.

The narrative has correlatives in popular media; the retreat into video
games wherein the only consciousness is that of the gun. In many games and in particular first-person
shooters, the user plays as the gun. It
is a tale from the gun’s perspective.
All enemies are obstacles, impediments, and roadblocks. The only agency is that of the phallic
monolith. This is part of why gamers
make the best misogynists and have been known recently to launch online
lynchings in which they send pictures of themselves raping feminists who
critique their favorite parlor/video games (time-honored favorites include the
sport of broadcasting privilege, confident that the gun below their belt is job
security). The video game controller
appears as if a vestigial remnant of the remote control nervous system, and
syndromic of the wired-in network consciousness of the web’s shared nervous
system, but it’s actually an extension of the monolith gun, particularly when
playing the aforementioned shooting games.

Some of the most popular video games are games of war and it’s no secret
that culture tries to reproduce the thrills of war in various contexts in order
to assure the ascendancy of the gun-throne in the popular imagination. Films that do not contain the threat of a
loaded weapon (or a phallic substitute like a sword) fare poorly unless loaded
with masked cumshots (grossout comedies), defamation of the childbearers
(predatory or adulterous women), or the heterosexual romantic narrative which
must conclude with the successful acquisition of a well-balanced man (in this
fantasy, some character flaw is able to be corrected by the woman as long as
there is no threat to his phallic authority).
However, films of war (whether global conflict, personal revenge stories, or tales that brand
phallic pathos as superego/superheroics) remain the heart of spectacle. War is the dominant force of meaning and its
nucleus is the gun. Guns make war both
necessary and possible.

At the center of the war is the soldier/martyr, the gun’s main frontline
missionary. He is the killer walking
among us, trained by ranks to internalize the thing he has done upon his return
home. As he walks about in a culture pretending that the war outside does not
exist, he is the hidden proof, the redaction allowed to roam free in white
space. With gun in tow, the soldier protects the homeland, and consequently assumes
the role of father figure for the whole nation. Ironically, the soldier
must often exit his own fatherly duties to become father/protector for the
nation, making him both absentee father and substitute father, deadbeat dad and
figure of valor. This act of sacrifice,
trading one’s own family for the collective family, on the face of it seems
noble, but its main consequence is further alienation from motherhood,
abandoning the birth-givers to lay praise to the life-taker in the gun,
anti-survivalism plunged ever deeper into void.
The cause is secondary, a homeland security blanket to throw over the
desire to kill.

In the leisure society, the remote was God. God was happening to us, and we
were standing in the shadow of His voice.
We existed because God allowed us to.
Now, the gun affirms our right to nonexistence. For the disenfranchised, the gun is the
equalizer. It is post-religion, post-passivity.
It’s no mistake that many of the most zealous phallic-cult devotees do
not believe in evolution. Animals can’t evolve if they annihilate their own
species or destroy their own ecosystem.
The gun is an economy of chaos, tired of the narrative of perpetual
progress. It’s looking for punctuation,
the end of history.

The gun works especially well in societies where individualism is
prioritized since the gun inherently puts a distance between its
user/missionary and its object. With the
gun in hand, one never has to die alone, because one can always feel secure
that he can take someone else down with him.
With a gun, one can make sure that their sadness won’t fail to strike a
lonely chord, that it won’t reverberate or not make a sound in the forest. The gunshot is the sound of the tree
falling. The endless cumshots are the
sound of the empire crumbling.

The gun is the amplifier and the
silencer, but nothing else. It is
Manichean and defining. The gun shows us
a picture of the world as we believe it to be, not an experience of the world as
we want it to be. Thereby, it is an
instrument of faith. Guns continue to
kill because our rash attempts to make the air unbreathable, the food inedible,
the streets unwalkable, the climate untenable, and the culture impersonable and
unapproachable are not happening fast enough.
Indeed, it is only a matter of time before we turn the gun on ourselves
and end our practice of creating life to focus on ending it. Then, we will become one with the monolith,
the ultimate phallic god, the stiff corpse, at perfect peace with its
surroundings. At that moment, we will
find peace in each other’s arms. Our story can then be told because it will
have punctuation and we will have become death, creator of worlds.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

As an alienated youth growing up in suburban America, I heard the name HR Giger pop up here and there at various points. The name is deeply embedded in that culture of sci-fi/horror films, comic books, sexual confusion, and heavy metal music. Giger existed in that space where kids always dared to go, but adults were far too afraid to. As a result, like the Heavy Metal magazines he used to contribute to, I never had the urge (or the expendable allowance money) to purchase one of his books and hide it from my parents (reactions to Dead Kennedys records and The Satanic Bible had not been favorable). By the time I was old enough to purchase whatever I pleased, I guess I had forgotten about him or moved into different circles of interest.

Co-opted a million times without credit, Giger's style- embossed surfaces, machinal veins, metallic grays, cold and dead terrain, beautifully hideous mutation, grotesque reptilian eroticism, perverted innocence vs. corruption as infantilization- became pantheon, backdrop. Almost so much so that his influence was underplayed in the world of the grim. It's sad that only in death could I, and probably too many other, comprehend this.

Of course, he's probably best known for his Necronomicon paintings, which provided the blueprint for the atmospheric production design behind the "biomechanical" world of the Alien films.

The hyperactive amount of detail and the strong emphasis on foreground was/is a hallmark of fantasy novels and prog album covers, but unlike the worst of those, no one could accuse him of skimping on perspective.

Bit of Bacon in this one.

Brain Salad Surgery is probably better known for its sleeve than the music within, which is to everyone's benefit. In fact, it might be the best album cover to a terrible album ever.

Far better, though far more NSFW, is his first album cover to the Shiver's Walpurgis:

did some other covers too:

Giger also designed some conceptual art for Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham's troublesome video for "Windowlicker"

He also took part in the occasional conceptual sculpture. This one, I think perfectly summarizes gun culture (which is fetishized in the milieu he served, but I've never seen it represented anywhere else in his art):

The one and only time I went to Limelight in NYC, I was struck by the Giger Room, which I believe was the industrial dance room and a uniquely novel space. It was odd that they allowed people to dance and get stupid in a room with so much touchable installation art, particularly as the club was known to, ahem, distribute supplements to the nightclubbing experience vis a vis the friendly staff. The only pictures floating around on the internet don't seem to do it justice:

Far more impressive are the Giger Bars overseas where you can relax by sitting on a tongue in the midst of a spine:

No doubt inspired in some part by the old Cafe L'Enfer from turn of the century France:

His work was so physical that it's not surprising that it leapt of the page in the form of actual artifacts, pushing the unconscious ever closer to the surface so that we weren't caught so off-guard when confronted with it.